at Delmonico's, and he made me the
following very singular relation:

'I had returned from a somewhat prolonged stay at Vienna,' he said, 'to
Paris, late in 1860. During the fall and winter of that year I spent a
good deal of time at the Louvre, making a few studies, and satisfying
myself as to some identities that had been called in question during my
rambles through the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. I lodged in the little
Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or
three minutes' walk from the Louvre, having a baker with a pretty wife
for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit
comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two
visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large
proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space
was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

'I do not know that I can have any objection to your knowing, before I
go any further, that I am and have been for some years a believer in
that of which Hamlet speaks when he says: 'There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.' You
may call me a _Spiritualist_, if you like, for I have no reverence for
or aversion to names. I do not call _myself_ so; I only say that I
believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we
read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical
organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are
communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach
each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or
why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity--that
'tongs with which God holds the world'--as a strong but odd thinker once
said in my presence, may be the medium of communication; but even this
must be informed by a living and sentient spirit, or it can convey
nothing. People learn what they would not otherwise know, through
mediums which they do not recognize and by processes which they can not
explain; and to know this is to have left the beaten track of old
beliefs, and plunged into a maze of speculation, which probably makes
madmen of a hundred while it is making a wise man of _one_. But I am
wandering too far and telling you nothing.

'One of my few intimates in Paris, a young Prussian by the name of
Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, n